Nightingale’s Soldiers Died in Crimean Cesspool: Lewis Lapham

By Lewis Lapham -
Apr 30, 2011

When Florence Nightingale arrived
at the British hospital in Scutari, Turkey on Nov. 4, 1854, she
found the wounded, sick and dying jammed together on lice-ridden
mattresses. Water was scarce, heating nonexistent and wooden
tubs lining the corridors provided toilet facilities for the
many cholera-ridden patients.

As the Crimean War raged, Nightingale worked 20 hours a day
feeding, medicating and washing the men. She overcame the
military bureaucracy, adamantly opposed to female nurses at the
front, to purchase new boilers, streamline the kitchens, and
hire laundresses and cleaners for the wards.

For all her efforts, the death rate of patients at Scutari
rose to 52 percent, and that winter 4,000 soldiers died, most of
them not even wounded.

A sanitary commission sent over from England determined
that the Barrack Hospital was built over a cesspool and that the
sewers were leaking into the drinking water.

I spoke with Orlando Figes, author of “The Crimean War,”
on the following topics: